Some people like smiling at strangers and saying hello to passersby. Bless their souls, those creepily friendly weirdoes! I, as you may have guessed, am not one of those people. Nothing warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart quite like strangers giving me the “Fuck right off!” look. As such, Boom!
Rocket League is a game that is concerned with a great many things, but verisimilitude is most definitely not one of them. To wit, here’s an excerpt from Psyonix president Dave Hagewood’s excellent interview with Gamasutra about the game’s jumping mechanics: Designing Rocket League‘s rocket-boosting
It is easy to pine for the old web. The past is in the past, temporally shielded from our attempts to fetishize it and incapable of reaching through the screen to knock some sense into its eulogists. This is how the nostalgia-industrial complex, the one sector that will never take enough of a pause
Don’t let their ostensible cuteness fool you: Tamagotchi, like babies and pets, are evil little monsters. That may not be an empirical fact, but it is the worldview of Hitogochi, a game that reimagines the Tamagotchi-human relationship from the perspective of the toy. A new human arrives in your lif
In the interest of full disclosure, let me start by confessing to my carnivorous ways. I enjoy eating meat, and lots of it please and thank you. Braised, roasted, grilled, cured, tartare, barbequed, sous-vide—you name it, I’ll eat. I cannot present you with a compelling ethical argument in defense o
Humanity’s most common phobia, according to a plurality of strange websites that specialize in this topic, is arachnophobia. Fair enough. Creepy crawly spiders are hardly pleasant. But fear is contextual: Your biggest fear when home alone is rarely your biggest fear when at a public event. For resea
On a daily basis, Chatroulette is home to far scarier interactions than Realm Pictures’ zombie-themed “Real Life First Person Shooter,” but few—if any—are as endearing. The setup is familiar: A player is dropped into a gameworld and explores it through their avatar’s point of view. This world, it tu
Say what you will about Dismaland, Banksy’s new theme park, but its tagline—“The UK’s most disappointing new visitor attraction”—might be the rare claim that the artist’s fans and detractors can agree about. Dismaland reimagines Disneyland as a rotting hellscape. Its perimeter walls and Magic Castl
We are in the midst of a board game boom, and FiveThirtyEight has figured out why: Kickstarter. You should read the whole story, but here’s the crux of Oliver Roeder’s analysis: “Since [2009], pledges to board and card game projects on the site have totaled $196 million, according to the company. Ni
The case for preserving brutalist architecture requires some strange contortions. Defenders of gems like London’s Robin Hood Gardens or the Orange County Government Center must claim that buildings whose charms are derived from their heft and imposing strength are at risk and in need of our protecti
The annual “song of the summer” competition is bullshit. Like summer movie season, which has taken over much of the calendar year over the course of Marvel’s latest phase, the song of the summer is a temporally inaccurate designation. But even if the song of the summer only made its presence felt du
Drift Stage is quite obviously a game about cars, but it is also a story about the passage of time. You can trace the evolution of car—and car game—culture in its influences: from 1960s Hot Wheels fantasies, to iconic cars of the 1980s, to 1990s arcade racers like Initial D, to the 21st century fund
Maze designers are under no obligation to make their creations difficult to traverse. A maze is simply a collection of branching routes, one of which leads to an exit on the other side. In theory, these routes can be readily navigable, and in that sense all cities are mazes. In practice, however, ma
Would that surveillance practices were reversible: we’d have a solution to the past decade’s revelations on our hands. But they aren’t and we don’t. Surveillance is more than a series of practices; it is a force with a momentum of its own and the turning radius of a cruise ship. Consequently, the de
Sometimes going out into nature just isn’t enough for a man. Sometimes, he wants to explore further and live a real adventure. Sometimes—nay, all the time—I want to witness that adventure in Burly Men at Sea. Burly Men at Sea is a brainchild of David and Brooke Condolora (aka Brain&Brain), the pair
I have but one question to ask about puzzles: if at some point a creator had a complete picture, why on earth would they smash it into pieces just so we would have to do more work before enjoying it? Kintsukuroi, an Android “experiment” by Chelsea Saunders, attempts to answer this question. It takes
What is a neighbourhood beyond a collection of functions such as greenspace, housing, shops, and schools—figurative building blocks that can be strung together to build a functioning environment? The neighbourhood-as-collection-of-blocks metaphor appeals to videogame creators and audiences because i
We are all low-poly before God and the free market. Polynomics is about the latter case, though the distinction is far from precise. Slated for an initial release in early 2016, Polynomics is an economic simulator. You play as the federal government of an unnamed area, issuing a currency, collecting
For those who play games at a steady—some would say glacial—pace, achievements become unmoored from the gameworld itself. They become associated with life events—I completed that level on my birthday and that other level the day before I got dumped. You age with a game, if not at its exact pace. Spe
This is an article about typewriters, but let’s start by discussing the difference between taste and flavour. Taste describes the five senses inside your mouth: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. Flavour, on the other hand, connotes a more holistic sensory experience. It combines taste with your
Stage Presence is karaoke with less musicality and more social anxiety, and really, what’s not to like about that? You play as the frontman of a band. You’re on stage at a large festival—think Glastonbury, but without the ambient fug—when something goes wrong. Who knows what went wrong. This is the
The Ear Force PX51 is a lot of headset—$296.95 worth of headset, to be precise. It is billed as an “advanced gaming audio system.” It comes with many features that are prefixed with “dual-”, which makes sense insofar as most people have two ears. All of that is a complicated way of saying the PX51 a
